Category: Science and Technology

When you receive “A File has been shared with you” email from a client you haven’t spoken to in a few months, pick up the phone and call him before clicking that link or flagging it as spam.

I called. My client’s exact words when answering the call were, “Aidan, don’t click on that link.” His phone was exploding and the SysAdmin was already scrambled to clean up the mess. I offered my assistance if he should need it, we had a good chuckle and wished each other well. The call was less than 30 seconds.

Benefit: virus not spread and now I’m back on my client’s radar when he reminds himself, “Oh, yeah, I need to have Aidan check on that thing that’s been nagging at me…”

I could rant for days here. On one hand, we have GPS. Its government controlled, slow, somewhat inaccurate but usually works. On the other hand we have a cluster of USPS data, cars & cameras collecting imagery, and wildly abused user-contributed information all of which are dumped into the collective hive-mind of free map software. Like a map, scrawled in Sharpie, on the wall of a bathroom stall.

Google maps is brilliant for traffic info. Not just real time, but predictively, too! That’s because every Android and logged-in gmail account has been sharing real-time informatics (whether you like it or not). It’s brilliant. You can even see traffic patterns based on day of week, time of day, even holidays. Provided that you know exactly where you need to go.

Apple/iOS maps… I think I had 3 birthdays the last time I tried to load that up. It was so slow I used my car’s navigation system instead. Gawd knows that’s an act of pure desperation.

In all fairness, I can’t attest to which system is more accurate for physical addresses. The final responsibility rests upon the shoulders of the US Postal service. Unfortunately, that tax-payer funded agency is now little more than an indentured servant to Amazon. Ultimately, we need the USPS for authority in this department…as if they should be surveying geological and location data, not just stamps and commercial mailers, and providing accurate information on locations and addresses within our country.

We could call it the United States Geological Survey agency, or USGS.govfor short.

There are companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars into cramming more and more tech into goggles and glasses: gps, video recording, augmented overlays, social media feeds. That’s all fine and dandy. But they’re missing one critical feature that would revolutionize the tech space:

Japan can send a spacecraft 200 MILLION miles from Earth almost 4 years ago so that it can land on an asteroid, take some selfies, email them to us, pick up some pebbles as souvenirs, then pack up its kit and COME BACK TO EARTH (e.t.a. 2020). Just kidding, it’s not really ’email’ per se, but at 200 million miles, does the carrier protocol really matter?

Meanwhile my bluetooth devices a few feet away from each other aren’t friends and couldn’t be bothered. The Chromestick? Apparently it has a grudge against the Apple Airport based on each other’s stock prices. My phone that is 2 years newer than Hayabusa2 and can’t take a picture that can be trusted to self-adjust its white balance, let alone reliably send it as an attachment to my Gmail account. A $90,000 electric car can’t even manage a range of 400 miles.

Yet, Japan’s Hayabusa2….

Here I was thinking those of you that will spend over $1000 for the new iPhone XS were out of your minds… but you’re right: I need to start my own government so I can create my own space agency to buy some tech that just friggin’ works, where I want it, when I want it… even if that is 2, 20 or even 200 MILLION miles away. Or right here at my desk, every single time I need it…without a system update notice that includes a reboot.

Interesting and slightly terrifying impact of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown of 2011: California red wine prior to 2011 had no noticeable trace (outside of background “noise”) of Cesium-137 radioactivity. After 2011? Cesium-137 appears by a factor of two (meaning double the background noise).

How did it get here? The ocean, the wind. From Japan to Seattle, then down along the west coast of North America where it was absorbed by agriculture and – potentially – every living organism in its path.

What does it mean? We’ll find out eventually once it’s too late.

There were significant problems with the meltdown that could have been prevented if we had functional, radiation shielded robots or R/C systems to mitigate the exposure as reactive systems. We weren’t ready for it. It happened and we’ll pay a price far beyond the initial “573 non-exposure” deaths. Researchers have just started to report findings that are tied to date and agriculture.

I still believe in nuclear energy. Outside of renewables like wind and solar, nuclear is necessary. But it comes with the overhead and preparation for the inherit risks. The Fukushima melt down could have been prevented, even when the tsunami could not have been, and the resulting disaster could have been better mitigated. We failed.

That sucks. It’s going to take its toll eventually. We’re at the initial steps of measuring how. We have to learn from this and invest in better management, over-site and response.

In 2014, I had a client named Todd. Todd was a friendly but socially awkward guy and we had done a fair share of business together in the past. He came to me with a new project that sounded interesting and we accepted the work. It was a civil issues project, focusing on local city ordinances and elections, allowing citizens to “upvote” issues that were important to them, all done via a mobile app. Todd would sell the reports back to the city, then the county, then the state. The project was partisan neutral and the reports would be available to anyone interested in purchasing a copy.

My company’s role would be to harvest massive amounts of data from various city and county websites and provide a back end to the mobile interface to collect user data and their upvotes for any given topic. We would also generate the reports. It was a lot of work because city websites are generally awful, without standards, lacking quality or any consistency whatsoever. At least back in 2014.

Another company would be creating the mobile app. They were known as Citronium. I interacted with their owner and a couple of their lead developers and engineers throughout the project. We were all making progress and were looking towards the impending launch date. Things were going well.

Not long before the launch date, Todd ran out of money and stiffed my company for more than a few thousand dollars. He did the same to Cintronium. The project halted and we all eventually went our separate ways.

The owner of Citronium contacted me a few months later and we chatted about collaborative projects as well as our options for what we could do with the existing codebase of the Meocracy project we essentially “owned” (my contract is crystal clear in this department) and we bounced a few ideas around.

Citronium asked if Ibex Data would represent them contractually here in the U.S. because they were losing sales by not having a domestic presence. You see, Citronium was based just outside of Moscow. Keep in mind this was still 2014.

I respectfully declined the invitation. Ibex has always been about hiring U.S.-based developers, engineers and designers. We have never hired offshore. This has always been a key tenet of my company so I couldn’t make an exception.

That was the last I heard from Citronium, at least until this weekend. I discovered while doing some “research” that Citronium had been using the address and one of the mobile phone numbers associated with my company as their own. While I’ve never received any mail or calls for them, their search engine presence along with my company’s information was nothing short of an alarming discovery. This was mostly SEO tactics, but if Russia-located Citronium appeared in search results above Ibex Data for our contact details, my company’s reputation was very likely damaged. It may have cost us any number of contracts over the years. It might also explain a few of the mysterious “thanks, but no thanks” declines I’ve received recently because my name is personally tied to both address and mobile details.

Now I have the miserable task of dealing with Google to try to disconnect their names from MY company and the reputation I’ve spent 10+ years solidifying.

The irony of the project and its participants in 2014 – in light of current political discussion – is not lost on me. I’m really glad I stuck to my guns and our core standards. But, damnit, I’ve got more important things to do today.

I walked into an aerospace manufacturing shop back in 1996 and introduced myself. I spent the next 8 months developing a paperless software solution for managing every detail of every part the shop built. From inspection reports, routing, treatments, to inventory. It was my first comprehensive solution that unexpectedly turned my career 90 degrees in a different direction.

I’m still helping them today. And 22 years later, their entire operation is still relying on what I built for them (with major updates along the way, of course).

As I was sweating buckets on their shop floor today, I recalled back when I worked at Boeing in Long Beach, managing all of the desktop computers for the C-17 division, as they were likely using the parts my client was manufacturing. There is a stark difference between the filthy, hot, shrapnel covered machine shop environment compared to the Foreign Object Damage (FOD) prevention obsession of the pristine assembly space for those aircraft with shiny painted and immaculate concrete floors and organized work spaces.

They are two sides of the same coin. I love both environments. I’m totally comfortable in either, minus the heat. Just need to step up my game on hand-coded CNC instructions to the skill level my client demands. You know, if I needed to go mill some robot parts.

Sitting in the conference room with the in-house recruiter who is whispering secrets about the company to me when the CEO enters. I stand, we shake hands and exchange pleasantries, and he then stares at me, emotionless, for 1…2…3…4… seconds, then sits.

I sit and smile, looking to the recruiter to direct the conversation or at least make the first move. Instead? Silence. I guess this is my meeting to run, then. Ok, I launch with my understanding with where the product is at and the short term upscale trajectory that needs to deliver in nearly 60 days.

The CEO sat and just looked at me, mostly without emotion, for nearly 30 seconds. He scratched his nose (there’s a tell), rolled his head to look at the recruiter sitting next to him, and said nothing. Then he rolled his head back towards me and waited for at least another 10 seconds and said, “You look different than your picture.”

After 30 minutes of rambling questions that were really nothing more than an opportunity for the CEO to speak, he departs and another gentleman enters. A COO of some sort. Suddenly, we’re engaged. Hard hitting questions with no nonsense answers about leadership, tough decisions and managing the unique personalities of a diverse development team struggling with an antiquated code base. This is my realm! Yes!!

At one point he asked how comfortable I would be doing a code review of software written in PHP v4. I deadpanned my expression and paused while waking up some neurons from 15 years ago.

“Bring it. That’s ancient but so am I.”

We talked for nearly 2 hours. He had to run having gone grossly over schedule. The recruiter had been fighting to stay awake throughout it all as we went deep on the tech. Once the COO left, the recruiter asked me, “you know who he was, right?”

“Yeah, James, the COO, right?”

“No,” he whispered, “That was James, this company’s founder and original developer.”

An associate of mine – who is not a technical person by any means – just called to let me know that Apple called him alerting him of a virus on his computer. The story just goes south from there in flames.

If you get a call like this, even if the number appears to come from Apple or Microsoft or Dell or anyone else, you are being scammed, victimized. Here’s what to do in the event someone says you have a virus and needs access to your computer: